Many bioethicists, including deontologists, have argued that moral judgments of human behaviours depend on the very nature of those behaviours. For instance, “killing” or “torturing” are intrinsically wrong, and could never be morally justified. This is a controversial assumption for consequentialists, who believe that behaviours cannot be morally judged independently of their consequences. Another common --but much less discussed-- assumption in bioethics debates, refers to the way the temporal sequence of the moral judgment is conceived. It is commonly assumed that we first describe behaviours in causal and intentional terms, and derivatively we make moral evaluations of them. This pattern is particularly explicit in end-of-life debates, where the distinction between “killing” and “letting die” is commonly invoked to justify why “killing” is, all things being equal, more problematic than “letting die”; or why “killing” should remain legally prohibited while “letting die” should not. Recent years have seen a flood of theoretical and empirical research on the act/omission distinction. People tend to judge “acts” as morally more relevant than “omissions”. Many reports in the academic literature demonstrate that harmful acts are judged more severely than corresponding omissions. Yet, some empirical studies (Cushman, Knobe and Sinnot-Armstrong 2008) show, however, that moral judgments of others’ behavior also shapes corresponding causal and intentional descriptions.

In the present study, we investigate whether, in the realm of end of life decisions, causal and intentional behavioral descriptions are influenced by the moral valence of end-of-life interventions. Specifically, we manipulate patients’ will—whether the patient wishes to die or not—and probe lay participants’ assessments of the physician’s causal role in bringing about the patient’s death.

We hypothesized that individuals conduct a moral assessment regarding the physicians’ behavior, which then impacts descriptions of the physician’s causal role on the patient’s death.As predicted, patient consent exerted a large influence on causal and intentional analyses across four distinct end-of-life scenarios. For instance, when asked about the “cause of the patient’s death”, participants ascribed a primary role to illness in the presence of consent, but to the doctor’s actions in its absence. When asked explicitly about their attitudes towards euthanasia, participants reported overwhelming approval—suggesting that moral opposition to medically-assisted death is not necessary for effects of consent on causal analysis to emerge. In ongoing work, we are investigating whether these effects are mitigated or aggravated by medical expertise.

The talk presents an on-going research project based on a series of experiments designed to test the following: first, whether people behind a veil of ignorance choose a liberal-egalitarian principle of fair distribution for a real situation in which they are going to participate by working and generating a common output; second, whether and to what extent do people actually distribute their commonly produced output according to the agreed principle, in absence of any coercive power, reciprocity/reputation effect, or external incentives to comply.

The underlying rationale for our questions is the idea that experimental data may help underpin normative theories of justice (Binmore 1993) –in particular we are interested in social-contract theories that defend liberal-egalitarian principles for institutional justice. As is well-known, social-contract theories, in particular the Rawlsian version, assume that ideally rational agents situated behind a veil of ignorance would agree on a liberal-egalitarian principle of distributive justice; they assume further that rational people can commit themselves to act in a fair manner out of a “sense of justice”. These theories are much criticized for their idealizing assumptions: if these assumptions are too removed from what is possible for ordinary people, normative theories may well lack applicability. Our objective is to contribute to the realism of social-contract theories by exploring to what extent some of these idealizing assumptions are reflected in actual behavior.

Some preliminary results show that subjects:Do indeed tend to agree on a liberal-egalitarian principle for distribution of common output when situated behind a veil of ignorance (knowing which kind of task they are going to perform, but ignoring a crucial element in their endowment: in our case, how many minutes they will have to work -in this case more minutes imply almost certainly more production).They comply with the agreed-upon principle much more than expected –much more than predicted by standard economic models.

The level of compliance depends to some extent on how agreement behind the veil of ignorance is reached: if they can talk to each other, even if the chat is anonymous, compliance level rises.They are influenced by actual bargaining and agreement among them (however it is reached) but not much by simply simulating the reasoning of the social contract.

Sourcehood versus Alternate Possibilities: The Problem of Free Will Throughout 21 CountriesIvar Hannikainen

Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Some philosophers hold that agents in a deterministic universe lack free will and are not responsible for their actions either because they lack alternate possibilities or because they are not the ultimate source of their actions. Do laypeople take either of these implications of determinism to preclude free will and moral responsibility? Building on previous work, we conducted a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic survey (N = 5,280) spanning twenty-one countries and sixteen languages to answer this question. Overall, for Western participants, failing to be the ultimate source of an action undermines free will, control, blameworthiness, and deserved punishment to a much greater extent than the absence of alternate possibilities. By contrast, Asian participants did not distinguish lack of sourcehood from absence of alternate possibilities. Within cultures, incompatibilist attitudes toward sourcehood, but not alternate possibilities, were also associated with cognitive reflection. We discuss these findings in light of past evidence about cultural differences in dispositional versus situational causal explanations of behavior. Finally, cognitive reflection appeared to account for the observed relationship between extraversion and ascription of free will and responsibility that has been reported in previous studies.